CITY COLLEGE FACULTY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POETRY IN MOTION

Title inspired by Pam Laskin

 

The plastic paint bucket drums are tapped, slapped

at times caressed 

as we are pulled along inside this metal coach

full of friendly half-faces that smile with their eyes

thump, thump, thump

I can feel it in my chest

thump, tha-dump, thump

The vibrations awaken my cells

Feeling alive

Feeling connected

The days of isolation and fear 

slowly take the back seat

become a foggy memory of the past

The feelings of connectedness

and compassion for humankind

appear during the most interesting times 

when you ride the MTA

A Yorkie sitting across from you 

barks…and barks…and barks…

as the good-looking tap dancer to your left

chugs his way down the car

stops across from you

begins to explain the ingredients one needs

to be a really good 

tap dancer

(the rhythm has gotta getcha!)

Back to his stage

squarely placed between people and pole

scuff marks abound

the tapping commences

slowly, then quickly

His limbs and his dreadlocks 

flailing about his dance space on the D line

Inviting our eyes

and our hearts

to open up to his gift

to receive his gift

and to give him a gift

as a token of our appreciation

for the beauty and joy he has bestowed upon us

on this Monday afternoon

a day typically reserved for frowns and earbuds

Our blue-lit faces gazing down at our devices

as we attempt to disconnect

disengage

disassociate

but he’s not havin’ it!

his feet keep tappin’

And with those tap, tap, taps

eyes look up

faces turn

and we stop

for a moment

and receive the gift

on a Monday afternoon

that is meant to bring a smile to these half-covered faces

with their tired, fearful eyes

In this moment we are connected through joy

and through applause

as our hands join rhythmically

and the sounds grow louder

And Those Vibrations

send a jolt to our hearts

And we remember

we are joy

we are love

we are connected

Music can connect us

As can a friendly face

smiling eyes and a kind gesture

like digging into your pocket and pulling out

a crumpled green piece of paper

that you smooth out on the leg of your pants

gently placing it inside the offertory bucket

that the artist uses to collect his gifts

his recognition

his tokens of admiration

and that gives him just enough

just enough

just enough motivation

to do it all again

in the next car

or on the next day

or for the rest of his life

All while that Yorkie barks…and barks…and barks

 

Jennifer Buño 

 

​

GRIEF LEAVES THE ROOM 

 

It leaves on a Saturday,

suddenly, while you are raking

leaves or taking out the trash.

Those inevitable, boring things. 

You do not hear it go;

it’s been quiet before when

it left certain rooms. It no longer

sleeps beside you, and you learned

long ago that the bed was seldom warm,

yet, the least of it was never about

a missing body. You’ve made the bed

nonetheless. 

 

Eventually, eventually 

you do not return its calls,

and really, what letter might you write—

How is the weather there? Do you have

the company of others?

It unclasps its hand from yours.

There is no urgency in its exit;

perhaps it was just a visitor all along,

there when you needed it, with news

of the outside world.

Your body has lost its ghost—

a gentle amputation. There was no pain. 

 

In its place came the mundane

art of acceptance, and you are able

to respond to emails, listen

to the opera, deal with late rent.

It never had a name, though you tried 

so many on for size. Nothing fit

when you tried to wear it

and you could not return a thing. 

You are well-dressed now, nake

in your best. Tomorrow is Sunday. 

The day of rest. 

 

Philip F. Clark

​​

 

OUT OF THE BLANK

 

We waited for Word to arrive

like a messiah in a stagecoach

or a sheriff riding a thundercloud.

But she came without a name,

a sheer barely there-ness,

teaching us first to hum

the song of the game show.

Essentially, nothing changed,

only now it seemed more colorful

and easily divided into categories – more fun.

Suddenly everyone took up a hobby.

Mine is getting in touch with

my antediluvian self – my inner reptile.

Fire and tools are still a long way off.

And language – well, who’s to say

we haven’t been speaking it all along.

 

Elaine Equi

Retired 

​​

 

THE LEAPING WORM  

 

The leaping 

worm 

lands 

in the socket 

of the eye 

no longer watchful. 

House 

of one room 

only, 

quite snug. 

Space 

of a single 

body, 

decubitus. 

No panoramic 

views 

in the head, 

bald 

from age, 

quite 

yellowish. 

His pants, 

jacket 

and shirt 

hang loose on him. 

A flower 

withers 

his chest. 

The tips 

of his shoes 

are watching him. 

 

Isaac Goldenberg  

Emeritus Professor 

(Translated from Spanish by Sasha Reiter)

​​

DISBELIEVING THESE DEATHS, I GO TO SIT BY LAKE HEBRON 

 

A thunderstorm has spun from a near-blue sky,
then faded like a tantrum, the child sunny and unharmed.
Warmth like a human’s breath shrugs off the fall wind.
The lake is only mildly disturbed; it didn’t know 

the deceased, so its sympathies don’t extend to empathy
and it is a lake, not a pathetic fallacy, though I try.
I work to stay here, not to be netted
to various keenings. Hard to do even on a good day.
In the shallows are the slabs of slate
like coffins fallen off a truck, each one
not containing a body I knew, although slate caskets
irretrievable in water speak to me. They inform me
that if I were really here I would notice the cloud
very like a whale until it blossoms like a poppy, fast. 

A chorus of dead from a chorus of caskets
ought to open their lids and shoulder out their slabs
to walk on water.
My dead father would eye the lake for plops of fish
he could catch and feel guilty for eating, eye to eye,
though he was dubious of lakes, preferring currents,
local water strung to seas, which lets me see him
as a river, bodies of water as bodies,
as metaphors, including the Babylon waters of weeping.
My mother, city born, should 

stride to me across the tidelessness,
the wind revealing her girlish nape,
and George my most recent dead guy, cleared
of the thunder behind his brow and now,

rise right here, part of the democracy of day,

along with Daniel Crisman, 25, dead on 9/11,
eighteen years ago today, a man I know from a poster
gladly diving at 43 into this crisp water, 
warmer than dying young. All my loves

with AIDS, the guys who I drag everywhere,
Ron, Len, Craig, Jay, Paul, Mark, John,

Tom, Richard, the armada ghosting the cove,
their wakes cut short, should land on the island I am. 

Hebron, the first city, arid, blazes from across the ocean
its millennia of murders, histories bleeding into each other,

torches and missiles and rifles like lake lightning.
Children killed in cars or cages—they should splash.
All of these once knew the word for lake,
said lake, swam in a lake of genuine water,
fell through the frosty metaphor of lake,
their lips too blue and sewn ever to say lake again.
Here they are none of them at all,
evaporated out of time until I become
a lake nobody swims in. Again the trees tremble,
the clouds lower their cliché of brow,
the water snaps like a shroud.
It is a day in September, more thunder to come.  

The lake is alive with togue, perch, and bass.  

 

David Groff

Originally published in Spoon River Poetry Review

 

​

BROKEN WRIST 

 

My arm a broken trunk

off on the side of the road

 

the pain of these gnarled branches

off on the side of the road

 

there are no leaves to give you

off on the side of the road

 

the years they can deceive you

off on the side of the road

 

they say it will get better

off on the side of the road

 

as rains are getting wetter

off on the side of the road

 

and trees continue falling

in forests and in roads.

 

Pamela Laskin

​​

THE AIR, HER CANVAS 

(for Alicia)

 

People don’t die in Argentina,

they disappear,

she always said.

Growing up in Buenos Aires

during the Dirty War

she saw art school friends

dragged from their easels,

embodied screams without sound.

She paints stones

ashes scattered on stones

dead birds along the path.

She became a Peronist

defending a corrupt president 

who fed the children of the poor

and punished the goons.

 

Estranged from her country

her hot temper flared along with

her lonely passion for painting,

and love of another exile,

a Sicilian who once hailed Mussolini.

Testa dura, she complained of him yet

his face emerging from a Rembrandt portrait

enchanted her painter’s eye,

while he looked off in the distance

dangling a time piece

to foretell her future.

 

We watched over her in the hospital,

eyes closed, falling,

as she swept her brush across blank space,

the air, her canvas,

all things falling

descending,

then finding her weight

beating her hands

upon the hospital quilt

fists tight, still fighting,

Disappearing.

 

Patricia Laurence 

Emeritus Professor

​​

 

BEFORE A BATTLE

 

I lie awake. The soldier does not sleep.

He ruminates on death, or oils his gun

Or feels his fire which wind has blown undone.

He shields the butting wind. The thin flames keep.

 

Tonight the soldier, fluent with despair,

May feel his old, crisp wounds. But I am hushed.

I cannot think, being so battle-crushed.

I touch the indifferent weapons we will bear.

 

The soldier warms himself. I lie awake

And see the bulk of death, how clumsily

It sets its feet. Above, not for our sake,

A dread, dumb thing lies frozen in the sky

And watches us. The ancient sinews tense:

We know it will allow our violence.

 

Paul Oppenheimer

​​

INDIAN POND

 

when the sun shines above the clouds

birds call, trees whisper in the breeze

the pond beckons— swim to the deep

we can do anything in this life

a dream ripens 

 

across Indian Pond one tree turns 

autumn around the corner

the sun disappears behind rain clouds

I shiver on the shore

the loons call back and forth

mothers call adolescents

born in summer

call their mates

call as they take flight

with a great flapping 

of wings

 

humbled by how little I know

and how much this place

has to teach me

 

Michelle Yasmine Valladares

​​

 

WARTIME ALLTHETIME

 

1.

It fell to the dead – 

after the last salvos,

after all the priests

had fled the town,

to baptize the infant child

and then hide him in high grass

near a muscular sprite 

to provide against starvation, 

shield against fire, war,

and the iron bands of closed borders.

The grasses betrayed nothing.

 

2.

The hidden child and his protector

have grown through the years, 

one taller the other smaller. 

Invisible, they’re spared the views

of cities and towns burned and blistered.

Between the blasts and silences,

a measured time prevails,

filled with imaginings:

the bombs land as duds, 

the sirens ring false alarms,

and the grasses part as they walk out.

 

Barry Wallenstein

Emeritus Professor 

 

​

AS I LOOK DOWN ON YOU, I LOVE YOU

 

from my back balcony

on your communal roof:

 

I view where you’ve placed 

a rectangular table,

 

so humans can dine together

socially, at a distance, after 7.

 

First, you prepare the barbeque,

and set the table—

 

I like to watch you

turn each piece of chicken—

 

Then a salad bowl appears,

and then the wine,

 

other humans now

relishing the time.

 

Tall, lean, and elegantly greying—

Anthony Bourdain or Prospero—

 

Three nights a week,

you create the feast

 

which lasts beyond 

the dark,

 

until it disappears                                                                                          

 

Estha Weiner

 

 

TINY DEVASTATIONS 

 

The hour rises

and there are things I don’t understand

 

for instance, why you

are always saving me in dreams

 

carrying my limbs

through circus tents

 

gently placing each fallen extremity

into a plastic, cracked blue bucket.

 

You say                  it’s okay, love

I’m protecting them

 

in case they don’t grow back again

I will sew them onto your body.

 

And I believe you

 

know this is the truth

because like each dream before

 

you promise me                    love, I will teach you to fly

and do

 

only after confessing

      we are both casualties of the same war. 

 

Alyssa Yankwitt

​

​